Antiracist Research and Practice for Environmental Health: Implications for Community Engagement

Communities who experience disproportionate environmental exposures and associated adverse health outcomes have long been aware of, and worked to draw attention to, the role of racism in shaping those risks. A growing number of researchers are focusing on racism as a fundamental driver of racial inequities in environmental health. Importantly, several research and funding institutions have publicly committed to addressing structural racism within their organizations. These commitments highlight structural racism as a social determinant of health. They also invite reflection on antiracist approaches to community engagement in environmental health research.

We discuss strategies for taking more explicitly antiracist approaches to community engagement in environmental health research.

Antiracist (as opposed to nonracist, color-blind, or race-neutral) frameworks entail thinking or acting in ways that explicitly question, analyze, and challenge policies and practices that produce or sustain inequities between racial groups. Community engagement is not inherently antiracist. There are, however, opportunities for extending antiracist approaches when engaging communities who are disproportionately harmed by environmental exposures. Those opportunities include a) promoting leadership and decision-making power by representatives from harmed communities, b) centering community priorities in identifying new research areas, and c) translating research into action by applying knowledge from multiple sources to disrupt policies and practices that create and sustain environmental injustices. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP11384.